`Oh, Mama!` Shows Yiddish Theater Is Back In Limelight

What about Malkele, such a hamishe madel (a fine girl, a homebody). She was pledged to Sidney Bittman in Poland but things got finster in di oigen

(dark before her eyes) when Sidney moved to America and became so farmisht and farblunget (mixed up and confused), he got engaged to Annie with her fancy, schmancy family.

But deigeh nisht, kinder. (Don`t worry). When this production of the Yiddish Theater Project--called ``Oy Mama! Am I in Love!``--starts unraveling, it all turns out well.

``The Yiddish theater always works out happily, singing, dancing, reaffirming values and marrying everybody off for life,`` says Stuart Rosenberg, the 29-year-old Chicagoan who produced ``Oy Mama!`` and is responsible for the touring company`s weeklong run beginning Tuesday at Skokie`s Centre East Theatre.

You don`t have to speak Yiddish to understand ``Oy Mama!`` It`s subtitled via powerful rear slide projectors that throw complete translations of the dialogue onto stage-right and stage-left screens--something Rosenberg describes as ``a nice marriage between modern technology and a traditional art form.``

The jokes, which mainly are visual, translate too. And audiences get the music, if not the words of the ad libs. They get the music literally, via a five-piece orchestra and 20 musical numbers with much joyous dancing and singing.

Professional Yiddish theater in America had been in eclipse for some 25 years until 1978, when the current company began performing regularly at New York`s Town Hall, largely because of the efforts of Raymond Ariel (who is married to Mary Soreanu, one of the stars).

The original Yiddish theater, which began in 1882 on New York`s Lower East Side, flourished for a time, supported largely by the 1.3 million Yiddish-speaking Jews who immigrated to America between 1881 and 1903.

Famous performers such as Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Ed Asner and Leonard Nimoy, famous drama coaches like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler--all got their starts in Yiddish theater.

But audiences waned as first generation Jews struggled to assimilate and lose old country ways.

``But by the second and third generations, American Jews, secure as Americans, began to want to know their heritage, their roots,`` Rosenberg said. ``In New York alone, there`s been a Yiddish theater revival recently. This year there were four productions either in Yiddish or with translated Yiddish content.``

Rosenberg, himself a second generation American Jew, describes the feelings that surfaced 1 1/2 years ago as he watched his first Yiddish theater presentation--``The Jewish Gypsy``--put on by the current company in New York. ``I realized I was seeing my own heritage, watching my own culture, one that had been snatched from the jaws of death, that had managed to avoid the Holocaust, that was vibrant, alive and well, singing and dancing even, in America.

``I was so delighted with this sense of my own roots that I wanted to share the experience. So I brought `Jewish Gypsy` to Chicago. It was such a success that I decided to bring this year`s production, ``Oy Mama!,`` to Chicago after it had played in New York and Los Angeles.``

Rosenberg explained that the word mitzvah, in Yiddish, translates as a good deed, a benevolent act. ``Like any great folk art, the Yiddish theater examines the social and moral values of its people and allows everybody--not just Jewish people but everybody--to experience that culture theatrically. In this way, the Yiddish theater enlarges the American theatrical experience. By making this theater available, by bringing it to other cities--to me, this is a mitzvah.``